Blackbird Blackbird's 2012 EP Boracay Planet takes its name from two sources: Boracay — a beach-filled, postcard-perfect island in the Philippines — and a dream Mikey Maramag had about the tourist trap, despite never having visited.

Jeremiah Fraites isn't famous — at least not yet. The drummer of the Lumineers, the folk trio who experienced an outrageously fruitful 2012, is talking to me two days before appearing on the January 19 Saturday Night Live, but he doesn't sound convinced that his band have crossed the fame threshold.

Cellars by Starlight Variations of "nightmarish" and "psychedelic" come up repeatedly as Matt Oates describes his band's work — which makes sense, given that Phantom Glue trace their roots back to Slayer, the Jesus Lizard, and cult post-hardcore act KARP.

Sometimes making a statement from a corner of a room feels truer than making one from its center. Kai Campos — one-half of the London duo Mount Kimbie — believes that reasoning was crucial to his desire to make electronica in the first place.

Punk makes good On July 27, Frank Turner played the biggest show of his life while surrounded by sheep, actors dressed as Brits of different stripes, a Ferris wheel, a synthetic recreation of the English countryside, and an unfathomably massive crowd.

Century Media (2012) The end is nigh, and it will be ugly. With Silencing Machine, Nachtmystium's sixth album, Blake Judd and his fellow Chicago-based melodic black metallurgists have put together a fantastically tormented document — a recipe for Armageddon that promises things getting darkest before the death.